Article archive / March 1, 2013
Originally published: . Volume 4, No. 7. Source pages: 10.
This month I’m delighted to have experts from the community comment, spanning from a study on neuroscience, to stress, to religious beliefs, to an unusual study on placebo. I wanted to add my 2¢ to this with a brief note about vocational interests, and benefits of related to job-person-environment match.
• “Vocational Interests and Performance: A Quantitative Summary of Over 60 Years of Research” – Perspectives on Psychological Science, July, 2012.
This is a comforting review of the literature about vocational interest and its value to predicting certain outcomes for occupation and academic work. The bottom line is, yes, vocational match is an important characteristic and the authors give us correlations of .30 and above for showing that interest, and also match (congruence), is as useful a predictor as many other traits. Authors conclude that interests are related to performance and persistence for work or academic context. Taking the Holland’s model, with interests of Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional, and developing the congruence score, they show us corrections mostly without problems in race or gender. Whoopee. We found this also in our research. One application is in teams and task matching. While the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is good, it makes sense to drill down a little more, so that teams don’t have to waste time trying to fit round pegs into square holes.
• “Short Report: Changes in Anterior Cingulate and Amygdala After Cognitive Behavior Therapy of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” – Psychological Science, February 2007.
“Although PTSD patients show increased orbitofrontal and medial prefrontal activity following treatment with serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs;[…]), no studies have investigated neural networks before and after exposure-based treatment of PTSD. We report on the first study.” Felmingham, and other found that “successful exposure therapy for PTSD is associated with increased rACC and reduced amygdala activation during fear processing.”
COMMENT: Kelley S. Pears, PhD, Psychologist, PTSD/SUD Specialist, Alexandria VA Hospital, VA Health Care System.
“The results of the study make perfect sense. It’s nice to have some confirmation of those hypotheses. However, when it comes to treatment, it does not change what we are doing at this point. PE works! CPT works! These therapies work because they help the individual suffering with PTSD to process the emotions associated with the traumatic event. PE and CPT just take different routes to achieve the same effect. “
• “Control of Gene Activity Altered by Acute Stress,” reviewed in Medical New Today, Translational Psychiatry. August 2012.
“Acute stress alters the methylation of the DNA and thus the activity of certain genes. This is reported by researchers at the Ruhr- Universitat Bochum together with colleagues from Basel, Trier and London for the first time in the journal Translational Psychiatry.”
COMMENT: Susan Andrews, Ph.D. Licensed clinical neuropsychologist and consulting neuropsychologist, assistant professor, and author of Stress Solutions for Pregnant Moms.
“The ‘psychosomatic’ argument that raged in medicine and psychology only a few short generations ago is finally being answered by brilliant biochemical research, such as this study published in Translational Psychiatry. Are the diseases that we know to be associated with stress really “all in our minds,” as we were once taught? Or, has the missing link been found?
According to an interdisciplinary team of German, British and Swiss scientists, the missing link may well be epigenetic processes. Stress alters parts of our DNA molecules within the first 10 minutes of normal, acute stress (such as having to solve math problems while others watch.)
Stress does not affect all genes but already we know it reduces some gene expression that is critical to the human ability to cope with stress. Research has already demonstrated that chronic stress increases the risk of physical and mental illness. Now, a link has been established between acute stress and changes in the body’s ability to regulate.
It is my hope that this information will motivate us to become more mindful of managing our daily stress. Young people who thought themselves immune to the effects of stress may need to rethink this opinion.”
• “Mind-Set Matters,” in Psychological Science, July, 2007.
Authors Alia Crum and Ellen Langer from Harvard describe their study testing whether the relationship between exercise and health is moderated by one’s mind-set, 84 female hotel room attendants were either given health feedback or not, suggesting they were benefitting from exercise. Compared to the control, those given the information lost more weight.
COMMENT: Phillip J. Brantley, PhD, John S. McIlhenny Professor, Associate Executive Director for Education, Pennington Biomedical Research Center
“An entertaining and clever study implicating the power of suggestion in altering important health risk factors. Study investigators apparently did a good job of convincing a group of 44 hotel maids that their jobs provide them with a healthy level of physical activity. Baseline and 4 week follow-up measures of perceived exercise, weight, body composition and blood pressure were taken and the group was compared to another group of 40 hotel maids who are not told their jobs provide them a health level of physical activity. This minimal intervention was reported to be associated with changes in weight (almost 2 lbs average weight loss) , percentage of body fat , hip-to-waist ratio, and blood pressure (10 mm reduction in systolic blood pressure) after 4 weeks. Given my experience conducting large multi-site clinical trials using intensive diet and exercise programs to reduce weight and blood pressure I find these results highly inconsistent. Even the authors are at a loss to explain how the suggestion of one having healthy levels of physical activity can achieve the reported changes in health risk factors. I certainly value the power of suggestion for enhancing motivation to make changes in diet and physical activity but “no behavior change, no health gain.” I vote for measurement error e.g., did they rest the participants for at least 15 minutes and take the average of three separate measurements to determine blood pressure, but the paper lacks sufficient procedural detail to test this hypothesis.
• “Religion Replenishes Self-Control,” in Psychological Science, May, 2012
Authors Rounding, Lee, Jacobson, and Li-Jun Ji look at the idea that regions is a cultural adaptation for self-control, and in four experiments they found that when religion themes are made implicitly salient, people exhibited great self-control.
COMMENT: Susan Dardard, PhD, Media Consultant, President, Sound Psychology, Inc., a non-profit educational media production corporation
“Here we have a timely topic for this Lenten season of the Christian calendar. Secular psychology scholars, including those writing this article, consider hypotheses on the creation and impact of religion on civilization. These authors review the literature on the emergence of religion as an adaptation that enhanced the advancement of civilization through promotion of prosocial behavior, and propose instead that "religion enhances self-control, which, in turn, promotes prosocial behavior." The researchers found that religious-primed subjects endured discomfort, delayed gratification, and ego-depletion significantly better than those who received a neutral prime. As a believer, I assume the eternal existence of God, and experience, on a personal level, that the power of faith does indeed provide the self-control that empowers me to ignore all ice cream everywhere until I finally feast on an ice cream Easter Sunday sundae. Happily, my personal practice and this scientific investigation unite to bolster my determination to abstain, making this an article well worth reading in this season of self-denial.”
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